The last Intesa Sanpaolo Report confirms how space is becoming an increasingly central theme in the economic and social debate, considering its strategic importance for the future development of countries.
The Space Economy includes a variety of different actors as well as innovative start-ups, as MIPRONS, with a strong focus on innovation technological: 2020 registered a generated worldwide value of 477 billion dollars, doubling 10 years ago. The main value of this complex system is the continuous transfer of knowledge, supporting a development synergistic with a high rate of innovation.
The Economy of Space is now at an important turning point with the entry of an ever greater number of private players and the commercial development of the sector, which expands the offer of products and services, markets and business areas, leading to talk of the New Space Economy. Italy is positioning itself in the seventh position among the G-20 countries for public spending budgets in the space sector, in ratio to GDP, and to the second by the incidence of public R&D in Space on the total (by 2020 about 1.5 billion euros), highlighting the role that Space plays in the national interest.
Italy boasts a good competitive position in the sector, as emerges from the data on international trade and innovative activity, focused on the core activities of the supply chain. Italy, with a share of world exports of 6.9% ranks fourth among the main leaders in the sector, after the United States, France and Germany.
To get a more complete idea of our country’s competitiveness in the space economy, the analysis includes an extensive mapping of the companies in the Space Economy supply chain in Italy. The companies mapped are 286: these are “young” companies, born after the 2000s and mainly small in size (under 2 million in turnover), with the presence of both spacecraft manufacturers, launchers and satellites, as well as players specialized in high value-added services to complete the sector’s production offer. Space Economy is in fact a world in which a variety of different activities coexist. This element of a mixture of sectors and production specializations also favors collaboration between the different one’s subjects, pushed to work jointly by sharing their knowledge and skills.
The enormous economic potential linked to the Space Economy pushes towards a new space race, which will also lead to the definition of new geopolitical balances and that a renewed regulatory framework will also be needed.